I don't think that's accurate, the PLAN had 8 Type 055s built in 4 years, and another 8 on the way in the same timespan. The USN in WW2 had over 100 cruisers built.
If we're talking about potential though, Chinese shipbuilding capacity dwarfs the US, and in a hypothetical war scenario (that somehow doesn't turn nuclear) with full wartime production the gap widens more. However I expect that given their expense and the fact that they'll be priority targets that the PLAN will likely use their submarines and Type 054A/B and Type 052Ds to do the heavy lifting, since a loss of a frigate or destroyer isn't as crippling and they're much faster and cheaper to build. It'll be like that image where the US navy has a handful of decades old arleigh burkes and trump battleships vs the latest batch of PLAN destroyers, laid down 2 months ago, commissioned last week, with another 4 dozen on the way.
I don't think the warming of relations with China (while big) is as huge as most are making it out to be, [Marx] Carney is a banker; he loves money first and foremost and is more or less just returning to what relations with China were before Trudeau Jr decided to burn all the bridges on behalf of the US (their assistance in the arrest of Meng Wanzhou was pretty representative of the overall buffoonery going on in the Canadian government at the time). Carney's a rare lib from an era prior to when libs started believing their own propaganda, and so he can do realpolitik to an extent. The biggest takeaway I think is that Carney knows how to hedge his bets and play major powers against each other for a better deal; if you manage to do it well it can be really beneficial, but as Ukraine showed, sometimes the USA will just coup you for trying to walk the tightrope instead of being fully subservient to them.
Isn't the whole point of Wagner plausible deniability anyways? Sure everyone knows it's just Russia but you kind of throw the pretense out the window if VVS get involved.
Once Canadians get that first hit of BYD goodness they will clamour for more. Only issue I can see is with so few being imported the dealers will do big markups and negate the value prop of Chinese EVs.
I wonder what their plan is once there's no more need for proletarians and we all starve to death. Do the handful of billionaires just hang out in New Zealand surrounded by robobutlers?
Depends more in this case on Iranian intelligence and their willingness to actually use them. Depending on the HQ-9 variant and the FCS/Radars paired with them, they can have the capability to detect and lock stealth aircraft, albeit at a shorter distance and therefore smaller response window than conventional. This means ideally your military intelligence needs to know their potential strike routes and can preposition your systems to intercept. Also, American EW planes have shown to work on older Soviet SAM systems, we'll see how hardened the more modern Chinese systems are against it. Finally, its a numbers game, did Iran purchase sufficient numbers of systems to tolerate attrition and ensure redundancy if SEAD takes out a few? How much coverage can they provide for important sites and air corridors? And who's to say if they won't just strike a deal with the US like before where they do some face saving strikes back and forth with no real damage and leave the SAMs out of the equation.
They have a bunch of MANPADS, a handful of kubs/buks, and a single functioning battalion of S-300s (aka like 8 available missiles, not nearly enough). The MANPADS are worthless against high altitudes so can only be used against helicopters, the kubs/buks are too old to be relevant against modern ECM and stealth, and the S-300s are too few to provide meaningful defense as they can be easily targeted and don't have enough capacity to saturate air targets. Modern air defense is something only countries with money to burn can meaningfully do, either via their own stealth fighters or with so many advanced SAMs that it's impossible to do SEAD effectively.
I wonder then if this was just a big PR stunt; things will clear up with time but it seems like loyalists remain in control so far and there's no indications of a conventional ground operation. They might be good at the whole shock and awe openers but time and time again have proven to be bogged down by protracted guerrilla war. Though it's good there hasn't been one yet, America might get bled but Venezuelan civilians will be the ones who suffer.
I get the feeling they have started to double/triple dip at this point, full price + sell your data + advertise.
Luckily TCL and Hisense have made the price of panels so cheap that unless you want some fancy OLED that a 300 dollar TV is more than enough for the vast majority of people.
What if this guy being a cybertruck driver and all mistook 26% slope grade as 26 degrees? Would be even funnier because 26 degrees is a genuinely steep slope but 26% is like 14 degrees which is quite manageable.
Yes the rear one is a grenade launcher with programmable fuses intended to shoot over cover and airburst over the people behind it.
Every country that had a program like this ended up cancelling it though because shit was heavy and expensive and not very good vs separate grenade launchers and rifles.
I don't think that's accurate, the PLAN had 8 Type 055s built in 4 years, and another 8 on the way in the same timespan. The USN in WW2 had over 100 cruisers built.
If we're talking about potential though, Chinese shipbuilding capacity dwarfs the US, and in a hypothetical war scenario (that somehow doesn't turn nuclear) with full wartime production the gap widens more. However I expect that given their expense and the fact that they'll be priority targets that the PLAN will likely use their submarines and Type 054A/B and Type 052Ds to do the heavy lifting, since a loss of a frigate or destroyer isn't as crippling and they're much faster and cheaper to build. It'll be like that image where the US navy has a handful of decades old arleigh burkes and trump battleships vs the latest batch of PLAN destroyers, laid down 2 months ago, commissioned last week, with another 4 dozen on the way.